CHAPTER I.

THE LOGIC OF HEGEL

_TRANSLATED FROM_

_THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE

PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES_

WILLIAM WALLACE, M.A, LL.D.

FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE

AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND AUGMENTED

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1892

NOTE

The present volume contains a translation, which has been revised

throughout and compared with the original, of the Logic as given in the

first part of Hegel's _Encyclopaedia,_ preceded by a bibliographical

account of the three editions and extracts from the prefaces of that

work, and followed by notes and illustrations of a philological rather

than a philosophical character on the text. This introductory chapter

and these notes were not included in the previous edition.

The volume containing my Prolegomena is under revision and will be

issued shortly.

W. W.

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE ON THE THREE EDITIONS AND THREE PREFACES OF THE

ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES

_THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC._

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER II.

PRELIMINARY NOTION

CHAPTER III.

FIRST ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY

CHAPTER IV.

SECOND ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY:

I. _Empiricism_

II. _The Critical Philosophy_

CHAPTER V.

THIRD ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY:--

_Immediate or Intuitive Knowledge_

CHAPTER VI.

LOGIC FURTHER DEFINED AND DIVIDED

CHAPTER VII.

FIRST SUBDIVISION OF LOGIC:--_The Doctrine of Being_

CHAPTER VIII.

SECOND SUBDIVISION OF LOGIC:--_The Doctrine of Essence_

CHAPTER IX.

THIRD SUBDIVISION OF LOGIC:--_The Doctrine of the Notion_

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

ON CHAPTER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE

ON THE THREE EDITIONS AND THREE PREFACES OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA

THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN OUTLINE is the third

in time of the four works which Hegel published. It was preceded by

the _Phenomenology of Spirit,_ in 1807, and the _Science of Logic_ (in

two volumes), in 1812-16, and was followed by the _Outlines of the

Philosophy of Law_ in 1820. The only other works which came directly

from his hand are a few essays, addresses, and reviews. The earliest

of these appeared in the _Critical Journal of Philosophy,_ issued by

his friend Schelling and himself, in 1802--when Hegel was one and

thirty, which, as Bacon thought, 'is a great deal of sand in the

hour-glass'; and the latest were his contributions to the _Jahrbücher

für wissenschaftliche Kritik,_ in the year of his death (1831).

This _Encyclopaedia_ is the only complete, matured, and authentic

statement of Hegel's philosophical system. But, as the title-page

bears, it is only an outline; and its primary aim is to supply a manual

for the guidance of his students. In its mode of exposition the free

flight of speculation is subordinated to the needs of the professorial

class-room. Pegasus is put in harness. Paragraphs concise in form and

saturated with meaning postulate and presuppose the presiding spirit

of the lecturer to fuse them into continuity and raise them to higher

lucidity. Yet in two directions the works of Hegel furnish a supplement

to the defects of the _Encyclopaedia._

One of these aids to comprehension is the _Phenomenology of Spirit,_

published in his thirty-seventh year. It may be going too far to say

with David Strauss that it is the Alpha and Omega of Hegel, and his

later writings only extracts from it.[1] Yet here the Pegasus of mind

soars free through untrodden fields of air, and tastes the joys of

first love and the pride of fresh discovery in the quest for truth. The

fire of young enthusiasm has not yet been forced to hide itself and

smoulder away in apparent calm. The mood is Olympian--far above the

turmoil and bitterness of lower earth, free from the bursts of temper

which emerge later, when the thinker has to mingle in the fray and

endure the shafts of controversy. But the _Phenomenology,_ if not less

than the _Encyclopaedia_ it contains the diamond purity of Hegelianism,

is a key which needs consummate patience and skill to use with

advantage. If it commands a larger view, it demands a stronger wing of

him who would join its voyage through the atmosphere of thought up to

its purest empyrean. It may be the royal road to the Idea, but only a

kingly soul can retrace its course.

The other commentary on the _Encyclopaedia_ is supplied partly by

Hegel's other published writings, and partly by the volumes (IX-XV in

the Collected works) in which his editors have given his Lectures on

the Philosophy of History, on Aesthetic, on the Philosophy of Religion,

and on the History of Philosophy. All of these lectures, as well as

the _Philosophy of Law,_ published by himself, deal however only with

the third part of the philosophic system. That system (p. 28) includes

(i) Logic, (ii) Philosophy of Nature, and (iii) Philosophy of Spirit.

It is this third part--or rather it is the last two divisions therein

(embracing the great general interests of humanity, such as law and

morals, religion and art, as well as the development of philosophy

itself) which form the topics of Hegel s most expanded teaching. It

is in this region that he has most appealed to the liberal culture of

the century, and influenced (directly or by reaction) the progress of

that philosophical history and historical philosophy of which our own

generation is reaping the fast-accumulating fruit. If one may foist

such a category into systematic philosophy, we may say that the study

of the 'Objective' and 'Absolute Spirit' is the most _interesting_ part

of Hegel.

Of the second part of the system there is less to be said. For nearly

half a century the study of nature has passed almost completely out

of the hands of the philosophers into the care of the specialists of

science. There are signs indeed everywhere--and among others Helmholtz

has lately reminded us--that the higher order of scientific students

are ever and anon driven by the very logic of their subject into the

precincts or the borders of philosophy. But the name of a Philosophy

of Nature still recalls a time of hasty enthusiasms and over-grasping

ambition of thought which, in its eagerness to understand the mystery

of the universe jumped to conclusions on insufficient grounds, trusted

to bold but fantastic analogies, and lavished an unwise contempt on the

plodding industry of the mere hodman of facts and experiments. Calmer

retrospection will perhaps modify this verdict, and sift the various

contributions (towards a philosophical unity of the sciences) which

are now indiscriminately damned by the title of _Naturphilosophie._

For the present purpose it need only be said that, for the second

part of the Hegelian system, we are restricted for explanations

to the notes collected by the editors of Vol. VII. part i. of the

Collected works--notes derived from the annotations which Hegel himself

supplied in the eight or more courses of lectures which he gave on the

Philosophy of Nature between 1804 and 1830.

Quite other is the case with the Logic--the first division of the

_Encyclopaedia._ There we have the collateral authority of the

'Science of Logic,' the larger Logic which appeared whilst Hegel was

schoolmaster at Nürnberg. The idea of a new Logic formed the natural

sequel to the publication of the _Phenomenology_ in 1807. In that

year Hegel was glad to accept, as a stop-gap and pot-boiler, the post

of editor of the Bamberg Journal. But his interests lay in other

directions, and the circumstances of the time and country helped to

determine their special form. 'In Bavaria,' he says in a letter[2],

'it looks as if organisation were the current business.' A very mania

of reform, says another, prevailed. Hegel's friend and fellow-Swabian,

Niethammer, held an important position in the Bavarian education

office, and wished to employ the philosopher in the work of carrying

out his plans of re-organising the higher education of the Protestant

subjects of the crown. He asked if Hegel would write a logic for school

use, and if he cared to become rector of a grammar school. Hegel, who

was already at work on his larger Logic, was only half-attracted by

the suggestion. 'The traditional Logic,' he replied[3], 'is a subject

on which there are text-books enough, but at the same time it is one

which can by no means remain as it is: it is a thing nobody can make

anything of: 'tis dragged along like an old heirloom, only because

a substitute--of which the want is universally felt--is not yet in

existence. The whole of its rules, still current, might be written

on two pages: every additional detail beyond these two is perfectly

fruitless scholastic subtlety;--or if this logic is to get a thicker

body, its expansion must come from psychological paltrinesses,' Still

less did he like the prospect of instructing in theology, as then

rationalised. 'To write a logic and to be theological instructor is as

bad as to be white-washer and chimney-sweep at once.' 'Shall he, who

for many long years built his eyry on the wild rock beside the eagle

and learned to breathe the free air of the mountains, now learn to feed

on the carcases of dead thoughts or the still-born thoughts of the

moderns, and vegetate in the leaden air of mere babble[4]?'

At Nürnberg he found the post of rector of the 'gymnasium' by no

means a sinecure. The school had to be made amid much lack of funds

and general bankruptcy of apparatus:--all because of an all-powerful

and unalterable destiny which is called the course of business.' One

of his tasks was 'by graduated exercises to introduce his pupils to

speculative thought,'--and that in the space of four hours weekly[5].

Of its practicability--and especially with himself as instrument--he

had grave doubts. In theory, he held that an intelligent study of

the ancient classics was the best introduction to philosophy; and

practically he preferred starting his pupils with the principles

of law, morality and religion, and reserving the logic and higher

philosophy for the highest class. Meanwhile he continued to work on

his great Logic, the first volume of which appeared in two parts, 1812,

1813, and the second in 1816.

This is the work which is the real foundation of the Hegelian

philosophy. Its aim is the systematic reorganisation of the

commonwealth of thought. It gives not a criticism, like Kant; not

a principle, like Fichte; not a bird's eye view of the fields of

nature and history, like Schelling; it attempts the hard work of

re-constructing, step by step, into totality the fragments of the

organism of intelligence. It is scholasticism, if scholasticism means

an absolute and all-embracing system; but it is a protest against

the old school-system and those who tried to rehabilitate it through

their comprehensions of the Kantian theory. Apropos of the logic of

his contemporary Fries (whom he did not love), published in 1811, he

remarks: 'His paragraphs are mindless, quite shallow, bald, trivial;

the explanatory notes are the dirty linen of the professorial chair,

utterly slack and unconnected.'[6] Of himself he thus speaks: 'I am

a schoolmaster who has to teach philosophy,--who, possibly for that

reason, believes that philosophy like geometry is teachable, and

must no less than geometry have a regular structure. But again, a

knowledge of the facts in geometry and philosophy is one thing, and the

mathematical or philosophical talent which procreates and discovers is

another: my province is to discover that scientific form, or to aid

in the formation of it[7].' So he writes to an old college friend;

and in a letter to the rationalist theologian Paulus, in 1814[8], he

professes: 'You know that I have had too much to do not merely with

ancient literature, but even with mathematics, latterly with the higher

analysis, differential calculus, chemistry, to let myself be taken in

by the humbug of Naturphilosophie, philosophising without knowledge of

fact and by mere force of imagination, and treating mere fancies, even

imbecile fancies, as Ideas.'

In the autumn of 1816 Hegel became professor of philosophy at

Heidelberg. In the following year appeared the first edition of his

_Encyclopaedia_: two others appeared in his lifetime (in 1827 and

1830). The first edition is a thin octavo volume of pp. xvi. 288,

published (like the others) at Heidelberg. The Logic in it occupies

pp. 1-126 (of which 12 pp. are Einleitung and 18 pp. Vorbegriff); the

Philosophy of Nature, pp. 127-204; and the Philosophy of Mind (Spirit),

pp. 205-288.

In the Preface the book is described (p. iv) as setting forth 'a new

treatment of philosophy on a method which will, as I hope, yet be

recognised as the only genuine method identical with the content.'

Contrasting his own procedure with a mannerism of the day which

used an assumed set of formulas to produce in the facts a show of

symmetry even more arbitrary and mechanical than the arrangements

imposed _ab extra_ in the sciences, he goes on: 'This wilfulness we

saw also take possession of the contents of philosophy and ride out

on an intellectual knight-errantry--for a while imposing on honest

true-hearted workers, though elsewhere it was only counted grotesque,

and grotesque even to the pitch of madness. But oftener and more

properly its teachings--far from seeming imposing or mad--were found

out to be familiar trivialities, and its form seen to be a mere trick

of wit, easily acquired, methodical and premeditated, with its quaint

combinations and strained eccentricities,--the mien of earnestness only

covering self-deception and fraud upon the public. On the other side,

again, we saw shallowness and unintelligence assume the character of

a scepticism wise in its own eyes and of a criticism modest in its

claims for reason, enhancing their vanity and conceit in proportion

as their ideas grew more vacuous. For a space of time these two

intellectual tendencies have befooled German earnestness, have tired

out its profound craving for philosophy, and have been succeeded by

an indifference and even a contempt for philosophic science, till at

length a self-styled modesty has the audacity to let its voice be heard

in controversies touching the deepest philosophical problems, and to

deny philosophy its right to that cognition by reason, the form of

which was what formerly was called _demonstration._'

'The first of these phenomena may be in part explained as the youthful

exuberance of the new age which has risen in the realm of science no

less than in the world of politics. If this exuberance greeted with

rapture the dawn of the intellectual renascence, and without profounder

labour at once set about enjoying the Idea and revelling for a while in

the hopes and prospects which it offered, one can more readily forgive

its excesses; because it is sound at heart, and the surface vapours

which it had suffused around its solid worth must spontaneously clear

off. But the other spectacle is more repulsive; because it betrays

exhaustion and impotence, and tries to conceal them under a hectoring

conceit which acts the censor over the philosophical intellects of all

the centuries, mistaking them, but most of all mistaking itself.

'So much the more gratifying is another spectacle yet-to be noted; the

interest in philosophy and the earnest love of higher knowledge which

in the presence of both tendencies has kept itself single-hearted and

without affectation. Occasionally this interest may have taken too

much to the language of intuition and feeling; yet its appearance

proves the existence of that inward and deeper-reaching impulse of

reasonable intelligence which alone gives man his dignity,--proves it

above all, because that standpoint can only be gained as a _result_

of philosophical consciousness; so that what it seems to disdain is

at least admitted and recognised as a condition. To this interest

in ascertaining the truth I dedicate this attempt to supply an

introduction and a contribution towards its satisfaction.'

The second edition appeared in 1827. Since the autumn of 1818 Hegel

had been professor at Berlin: and the manuscript was sent thence (from

August 1826 onwards) to Heidelberg, where Daub, his friend--himself

a master in philosophical theology--attended to the revision of the

proofs. 'To the Introduction,' writes Hegel[9], 'I have given perhaps

too great an amplitude: but it, above all, would have cost me time and

trouble to bring within narrower compass. Tied down and distracted

by lectures, and sometimes here in Berlin by other things too, I

have--without a general survey--allowed myself so large a swing that

the work has grown upon me, and there was a danger of its turning into

a book. I have gone through it several times. The treatment of the

attitudes (of thought) which I have distinguished in it was to meet an

interest of the day. The rest I have sought to make more definite, and

so far as may be clearer; but the main fault is not mended--to do which

would require me to limit the detail more, and on the other hand make

the whole more surveyable, so that the contents should better answer

the title of an Encyclopaedia.' Again, in Dec. 1826, he writes[10]: 'In

the Naturphilosophie I have made essential changes, but could not help

here and there going too far into a detail which is hardly in keeping

with the tone of the whole. The second half of the Geistesphilosophie

I shall have to modify entirely.' In May 1827, Hegel offers his

explanation of delay in the preface, which, like the concluding

paragraphs, touches largely on contemporary theology. By August of that

year the book was finished, and Hegel off to Paris for a holiday.

In the second edition, which substantially fixed the form of the

_Encyclopaedia_, the pages amount to xlii, 534--nearly twice as many

as the first, which, however, as Professor Caird remarks, 'has a

compactness, a brief energy and conclusiveness of expression, which

he never surpassed.' The Logic now occupies pp. 1214, Philosophy of

Nature 215-354, and Philosophy of Spirit from 355-534. The second part

therefore has gained least; and in the third part the chief single

expansions occur towards the close and deal with the relations of

philosophy, art, and religion in the State; viz. § 563 (which in the

third edition is transposed to § 552), and § 573 (where two pages are

enlarged to 18). In the first part, or the Logic, the main increase

and alteration falls within the introductory chapters, where 96 pages

take the place of 30. The Vorbegriff (preliminary notion) of the first

edition had contained the distinction of the three logical 'moments'

(see p. 142), with a few remarks on the methods, first, of metaphysic,

and then (after a brief section on empiricism), of the 'Critical

Philosophy through which philosophy has reached its close.' Instead

of this the second edition deals at length, under this head, with the

three 'attitudes (or positions) of thought to objectivity;' where,

besides a more lengthy criticism of the Critical philosophy, there is a

discussion of the doctrines of Jacobi and other Intuitivists.

The Preface, like much else in this second edition, is an assertion

of the right and the duty of philosophy to treat independently of

the things of God, and an emphatic declaration that the result of

scientific investigation of the truth is, not the subversion of

the faith, but 'the restoration of that sum of absolute doctrine

which thought at first would have put behind and beneath itself--a

restoration of it however in the most characteristic and the freest

element of the mind.' Any opposition that may be raised against

philosophy on religious grounds proceeds, according to Hegel, from a

religion which has abandoned its true basis and entrenched itself in

formulae and categories that pervert its real nature. 'Yet,' he adds

(p. vii), 'especially where religious subjects are under discussion,

philosophy is expressly set aside, as if in that way all mischief were

banished and security against error and illusion attained;' ... 'as if

philosophy--the mischief thus kept at a distance--were anything but

the investigation of Truth, but with a full sense of the nature and

value of the intellectual links which give unity and form to all fact

whatever.' 'Lessing,' he continues (p. xvi), 'said in his time that

people treat Spinoza like a dead dog[11]. It cannot be said that in

recent times Spinozism and speculative philosophy in general have been

better treated.'

The time was one of feverish unrest and unwholesome irritability. Ever

since the so-called Carlsbad decrees of 1819 all the agencies of the

higher literature and education had been subjected to an inquisitorial

supervision which everywhere surmised political insubordination and

religious heresy. A petty provincialism pervaded what was then still

the small Residenz-Stadt Berlin; and the King, Frederick William

III, cherished to the full that paternal conception of his position

which has not been unusual in the royal house of Prussia. Champions

of orthodoxy warned him that Hegelianism was unchristian, if not even

anti-christian. Franz von Baader, the Bavarian religious philosopher

(who had spent some months at Berlin during the winter of 1823-4,

studying the religious and philosophical teaching of the universities

in connexion with the revolutionary doctrines which he saw fermenting

throughout Europe), addressed the king in a communication which

described the prevalent Protestant theology as infidel in its very

source, and as tending directly to annihilate the foundations of

the faith. Hegel himself had to remind the censor of heresy that

'all speculative philosophy on religion maybe carried to atheism:

all depends on who carries it; the peculiar piety of our times and

the malevolence of demagogues will not let us want carriers[12].'

His own theology was suspected both by the Rationalists and by the

Evangelicals. He writes to his wife (in 1827) that he had looked at

the university buildings in Louvain and Liège with the feeling that

they might one day afford him a resting-place 'when the parsons in

Berlin make the Kupfergraben completely intolerable for him[13].' 'The

Roman Curia,' he adds, 'would be a more honourable opponent than the

miserable cabals of a miserable boiling of parsons in Berlin.' Hence

the tone in which the preface proceeds (p. xviii).

'Religion is the kind and mode of consciousness in which the Truth

appeals to all men, to men of every degree of education; but the

scientific ascertainment of the Truth is a special kind of this

consciousness, involving a labour which not all but only a few

undertake. The substance of the two is the same; but as Homer says of

some stars that they have two names, the one in the language of the

gods, the other in the language of ephemeral men--so for that substance

there are two languages,--the one of feeling, of pictorial thought,

and of the limited intellect that makes its home in finite categories

and inadequate abstractions, the other the language of the concrete

notion. If we propose then to talk of and to criticise philosophy from

the religious point of view, there is more requisite than to possess

a familiarity with the language of the ephemeral consciousness. The

foundation of scientific cognition is the substantiality at its core,

the indwelling idea with its stirring intellectual life; just as the

essentials of religion are a heart fully disciplined, a mind awake to

self-collectedness, a wrought and refined substantiality. In modern

times religion has more and more contracted the intelligent expansion

of its contents and withdrawn into the intensiveness of piety, or even

of feeling,--a feeling which betrays its own scantiness and emptiness.

So long however as it still has a creed, a doctrine, a system of dogma,

it has what philosophy can occupy itself with and where it can find for

itself a point of union with religion. This however is not to be taken

in the wrong separatist sense (so dominant in our modern religiosity)

representing the two as mutually exclusive, or as at bottom so capable

of separation that their union is only imposed from without. Rather,

even in what has gone before, it is implied that religion may well

exist without philosophy, but philosophy not without religion--which

it rather includes. True religion--intellectual and spiritual

religion--must have body and substance, for spirit and intellect are

above all consciousness, and consciousness implies an _objective_ body

and substance.

'The contracted religiosity which narrows itself to a point in the

heart must make that heart's softening and contrition the essential

factor of its new birth; but it must at the same time recollect that it

has to do with the heart of a spirit, that the spirit is the appointed

authority over the heart, and that it can only have such authority so

far as it is itself born again. This new birth of the spirit out of

natural ignorance and natural error takes place through instruction and

through that faith in objective truth and substance which is due to the

witness of the spirit. This new birth of the spirit is besides _ipso

facto_ a new birth of the heart out of that vanity of the one-sided

intellect (on which it sets so much) and its discoveries that finite is

different from infinite, that philosophy must either be polytheism, or,

in acuter minds, pantheism, &c. It is, in short, a new birth out of the

wretched discoveries on the strength of which pious humility holds its

head so high against philosophy and theological science. If religiosity

persists in clinging to its unexpanded and therefore unintelligent

intensity, then it can be sensible only of the contrast which divides

this narrow and narrowing form from the intelligent expansion of

doctrine as such, religious not less than philosophical.'

After an appreciative quotation from Franz von Baader, and noting his

reference to the theosophy of Böhme, as a work of the past from which

the present generation might learn the speculative interpretation of

Christian doctrines, he reverts to the position that the only mode in

which thought will admit a reconciliation with religious doctrines, is

when these doctrines have learned to 'assume their worthiest phase--the

phase of the notion, of necessity, which binds, and thus also makes

free everything, fact no less than thought.' But it is not from Böhme

or his kindred that we are likely to get the example of a philosophy

equal to the highest theme--to the comprehension of divine things. 'If

old things are to be revived--an old phase, that is; for the burden

of the theme is ever young--the phase of the Idea such as Plato and,

still better, as Aristotle conceived it, is far more deserving of being

recalled,--and for the further reason that the disclosure of it, by

assimilating it into our system of ideas, is, _ipso facto,_ not merely

an interpretation of it, but a progress of the science itself. But

to interpret such forms of the Idea by no means lies so much on the

surface as to get hold of Gnostic and Cabbalistic phantasmagorias; and

to develope Plato and Aristotle is by no means the sinecure that it is

to note or to hint at echoes of the Idea in the medievalists.'

The third edition of the _Encyclopaedia,_ which appeared in 1830,

consists of pp. lviii, 600--a slight additional increase. The increase

is in the Logic, eight pages; in the Philosophy of Nature, twenty-three

pages; and in the Philosophy of Spirit, thirty-four pages. The concrete

topics, in short, gain most.

The preface begins by alluding to several criticisms on his

philosophy,--'which for the most part have shown little vocation for

the business'--and to his discussion of them in the _Jahrbücher_ of

1829 (_Vermischte Schriften,_ ii. 149). There is also a paragraph

devoted to the quarrel originated by the attack in Hengstenberg's

Evangelical Journal on the rationalism of certain professors at Halle

(notably Gesenius and Wegscheider),--(an attack based on the evidence

of students' note-books), and by the protest of students and professors

against the insinuations. 'It seemed a little while ago,' says Hegel

(p. xli), 'as if there was an initiation, in a scientific spirit

and on a wider range, of a more serious inquiry, from the region of

theology and even of religiosity, touching God, divine things, and

reason. But the very beginning of the movement checked these hopes;

the issue turned on personalities, and neither the pretensions of the

accusing pietists nor the pretensions of the free reason they accused,

rose to the real subject, still less to a sense that the subject

could only be discussed on philosophic soil. This personal attack, on

the basis of very special externalities of religion, displayed the

monstrous assumption of seeking to decide by arbitrary decree as to

the Christianity of individuals, and to stamp them accordingly with

the seal of temporal and eternal reprobation. Dante, in virtue of the

enthusiasm of divine poesy, has dared to handle the keys of Peter, and

to condemn by name to the perdition of hell many--already deceased

however--of his contemporaries, even Popes and Emperors. A modern

philosophy has been made the subject of the infamous charge that in

it human individuals usurp the rank of God; but such a fictitious

charge--reached by a false logic--pales before the actual assumption

of behaving like judges of the world, prejudging the Christianity of

individuals, and announcing their utter reprobation. The Shibboleth

of this absolute authority is the name of the Lord Christ, and the

assertion that the Lord dwells in the hearts of these judges.' But the

assertion is ill supported by the fruits they exhibit,--the monstrous

insolence with which they reprobate and condemn.

But the evangelicals are not alone to blame for the bald and

undeveloped nature of their religious life; the same want of free and

living growth in religion characterises their opponents. 'By their

formal, abstract, nerveless reasoning, the rationalists have emptied

religion of all power and substance, no less than the pietists by the

reduction of all faith to the Shibboleth of Lord! Lord! One is no

whit better than the other: and when they meet in conflict there is

no material on which they could come into contact, no common ground,

and no possibility of carrying on an inquiry which would lead to

knowledge and truth. "Liberal" theology on its side has not got beyond

the formalism of appeals to liberty of conscience, liberty of thought,

liberty of teaching, to reason itself and to science. Such liberty no

doubt describes the _infinite right_ of the spirit, and the second

special condition of truth, supplementary to the first, faith. But

the rationalists steer clear of the material point: they do not tell

us the reasonable principles and laws involved in a free and genuine

conscience, nor the import and teaching of free faith and free thought;

they do not get beyond a bare negative formalism and the liberty to

embody their liberty at their fancy and pleasure--whereby in the end

it matters not how it is embodied. There is a further reason for

their failure to reach a solid doctrine. The Christian community must

be, and ought always to be, unified by the tie of a doctrinal idea,

a confession of faith; but the generalities and abstractions of the

stale, not living, waters of rationalism forbid the specificality of

an inherently definite and fully developed body of Christian doctrine.

Their opponents, again, proud of the name Lord! Lord! frankly and

openly disdain carrying out the faith into the fulness of spirit,

reality, and truth.'

In ordinary moods of mind there is a long way from logic to religion.

But almost every page of what Hegel has called Logic is witness to

the belief in their ultimate identity. It was no new principle of

later years for him. He had written in post-student days to his

friend Schelling: 'Reason and freedom remain our watch-word, and our

point of union the invisible church[14].' His parting token of faith

with another youthful comrade, the poet Hölderlin, had been 'God's

kingdom[15].'

But after 1827 this religious appropriation of philosophy becomes

more apparent, and in 1829 Hegel seemed deliberately to accept the

position of a Christian philosopher which Göschel had marked out for

him. 'A philosophy without heart and a faith without intellect,' he

remarks[16], 'are abstractions from the true life of knowledge and

faith. The man whom philosophy leaves cold, and the man whom real faith

does not illuminate may be assured that the fault lies in them, not in

knowledge and faith. The former is still an alien to philosophy, the

latter an alien to faith.'

This is not the place--in a philological chapter--to discuss the issues

involved in the announcement that the truth awaits us ready to hand[17]

'in all genuine consciousness, in all religions and philosophies.'

Yet one remark may be offered against hasty interpretations of a

'speculative' identity. If there is a double edge to the proposition

that the actual is the reasonable, there is no less caution necessary

in approaching and studying from both sides the far-reaching import

of that equation to which Joannes Scotus Erigena gave expression ten

centuries ago: '_Non alia est philosophia, i.e. sapientiae studium,

et alia religio. Quid est aliud de philosophia tractare nisi verae

religionis regulas exponere?_'

[1] _Christian Märklin,_ cap. 3.

[2] Hegel's _Briefe,_ i. 141.

[3] _Ibid._ i. 172.

[4] Hegel's _Briefe,_ i. 138.

[5] _Ibid._ i. 339.

[6] Hegel's _Briefe,_ i. 328.

[7] _Ibid._ i. 273.

[8] _Ibid._ i. 373.

[9] Hegel's _Briefe,_ ii. 204.

[10] _Ibid._ ii. 230.

[11] Jacobi's _Werke,_ iv. A, p. 63.

[12] Hegel's _Briefe,_ ii. 54.

[13] _Ibid._ ii. 276.

[14] Hegel's _Briefe,_ i. 13.

[15] Hölderlin's _Leben_ (Litzmann), p. 183.

[16] _Verm. Sehr._ ii. 144.

[17] Hegel's _Briefe,_ ii. 80.

* * * * *

_The following Errata in the Edition of the Logic as given in the

Collected Works (Vol. VI.) are corrected in the translation. The

references in brackets are to the_ German text.

Page 95, line 1. Und Objektivität has dropped out after der

Subjektivität. [VI. 98, l. 10 from bottom.]

P. 97, l. 2. The 2nd ed. reads (die Gedanken) nicht in Solchem, instead

of nicht als in Solchem (3rd ed.). [VI. p. 100, l. 3 from bottom.]

P. 169, l. 13 from bottom. Instead of the reading of the _Werke_ and of

the 3rd ed. read as in ed. II. Also ist dieser Gegenstand nichts. [VI.

p. 178, l. 11.]

P. 177, l. 3 from bottom. Verstandes; Gegenstandes is a mistake for

Verstandes; Gegensatzes, as in edd. II and III. [VI. p. 188, l. 2.]

P. 231, l. 19. weiten should be weitern. [VI. p. 251, l. 3 from bottom.]

P. 316, l. 15. Dinglichkeit is a misprint for Dingheit, as in Hegel's

own editions. [VI. p. 347, l. 1.]

P. 352, l. 14 from bottom, for seine Realität read seiner Realität.

[VI. p. 385, l. 8.]

THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC

(_THE FIRST PART OF THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES IN

OUTLINE_)

BY G. W. F. HEGEL

THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

1.] PHILOSOPHY misses an advantage enjoyed by the other sciences. It

cannot like them rest the existence of its objects on the natural

admissions of consciousness, nor can it assume that its method of

cognition, either for starting or for continuing, is one already

accepted. The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the

same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme

sense in which God and God only is the Truth. Both in like manner go on

to treat of the finite worlds of Nature and the human Mind, with their

relation to each other and to their truth in God. Some _acquaintance_

with its objects, therefore, philosophy may and even must presume, that

and a certain interest in them to boot, were it for no other reason

than this: that in point of time the mind makes general _images_ of

objects, long before it makes _notions_ of them, and that it is only

through these mental images, and by recourse to them, that the thinking

mind rises to know and comprehend _thinkingly._

But with the rise of this thinking study of things, it soon becomes

evident that thought will be satisfied with nothing short of showing

the _necessity_ of its facts, of demonstrating the existence of

its objects, as well as their nature and qualities. Our original

acquaintance with them is thus discovered to be inadequate. We can

assume nothing, and assert nothing dogmatically; nor can we accept the

assertions and assumptions of others. And yet we must make a beginning:

and a beginning, as primary and underived, makes an assumption, or

rather is an assumption. It seems as if it were impossible to make a

beginning at all.

2.] This _thinking study of things_ may serve, in a general way, as

a description of philosophy. But the description is too wide. If it

be correct to say, that thought makes the distinction between man and

the lower animals, then everything human is human, for the sole and

simple reason that it is due to the operation of thought. Philosophy,

on the other hand, is a peculiar mode of thinking--a mode in which

thinking becomes knowledge, and knowledge through notions. However

great therefore may be the identity and essential unity of the two

modes of thought, the philosophic mode gets to be different from the

more general thought which acts in all that is human, in all that gives

humanity its distinctive character. And this difference connects itself

with the fact that the strictly human and thought-induced phenomena of

consciousness do not originally appear in the form of a thought, but as

a feeling, a perception, or mental image--all of which aspects must be

distinguished from the form of thought proper.

According to an old preconceived idea, which has passed into a trivial

proposition, it is thought which marks the man off from the animals.

Yet trivial as this old belief may seem, it must, strangely enough,

be recalled to mind in presence of certain preconceived ideas of the

present day. These ideas would put feeling and thought so far apart as

to make them opposites, and would represent them as so antagonistic,

that feeling, particularly religious feeling, is supposed to be

contaminated, perverted, and even annihilated by thought. They also

emphatically hold that religion and piety grow out of, and rest upon

something else, and not on thought. But those who make this separation

forget meanwhile that only man has the capacity for religion, and that

animals no more have religion than they have law and morality.

Those who insist on this separation of religion from thinking usually

have before their minds the sort of thought that may be styled

_after-thought._ They mean 'reflective' thinking, which has to deal

with thoughts as thoughts, and brings them into consciousness.

Slackness to perceive and keep in view this distinction which

philosophy definitely draws in respect of thinking is the source of

the crudest objections and reproaches against philosophy. Man,--and

that just because it is his nature to think,--is the only being that

possesses law, religion, and morality. In these spheres of human life,

therefore, thinking, under the guise of feeling, faith, or generalised

image, has not been inactive: its action and its productions are

there present and therein contained. But it is one thing to have such

feelings and generalised images that have been moulded and permeated by

thought, and another thing to have thoughts about them. The thoughts,

to which after-thought upon those modes of consciousness gives rise,

are what is comprised under reflection, general reasoning, and the

like, as well as under philosophy itself.

The neglect of this distinction between thought in general and the

reflective thought of philosophy has also led to another and more

frequent misunderstanding. Reflection of this kind has been often

maintained to be the condition, or even the only way, of attaining a

consciousness and certitude of the Eternal and True. The (now somewhat

antiquated) metaphysical proofs of God's existence, for example, have

been treated, as if a knowledge of them and a conviction of their truth

were the only and essential means of producing a belief and conviction

that there is a God. Such a doctrine would find its parallel, if we

said that eating was impossible before we had acquired a knowledge

of the chemical, botanical, and zoological characters of our food;

and that we must delay digestion till we had finished the study of

anatomy and physiology. Were it so, these sciences in their field,

like philosophy in its, would gain greatly in point of utility; in

fact, their utility would rise to the height of absolute and universal

indispensableness. Or rather, instead of being indispensable, they

would not exist at all.

3.] The _Content,_ of whatever kind it be, with which our consciousness

is taken up, is what constitutes the qualitative character of our

feelings, perceptions, fancies, and ideas; of our aims and duties;

and of our thoughts and notions. From this point of view, feeling,

perception, &c. are the _forms_ assumed by these contents. The contents

remain one and the same, whether they are felt, seen, represented, or

willed, and whether they are merely felt, or felt with an admixture of

thoughts, or merely and simply thought. In any one of these forms, or

in the admixture of several, the contents confront consciousness, or

are its _object._ But when they are thus objects of consciousness, the

modes of the several forms ally themselves with the contents; and each

form of them appears in consequence to give rise to a special object.

Thus what is the same at bottom, may look like a different sort of

fact.

The several modes of feeling, perception, desire, and will, so far

as we are _aware_ of them, are in general called ideas (mental

representations): and it may be roughly said, that philosophy puts

thoughts, categories, or, in more precise language, adequate _notions,_

in the place of the generalised images we ordinarily call ideas. Mental

impressions such as these may be regarded as the metaphors of thoughts

and notions. But to have these figurate conceptions does not imply

that we appreciate their intellectual significance, the thoughts and

rational notions to which they correspond. Conversely, it is one thing

to have thoughts and intelligent notions, and another to know what

impressions, perceptions, and feelings correspond to them.

This difference will to some extent explain what people call the

unintelligibility of philosophy. Their difficulty lies partly in an

incapacity--which in itself is nothing but want of habit--for abstract

thinking; _i.e._ in an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move

about in them. In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts are clothed

upon and made one with the sensuous or spiritual material of the hour;

and in reflection, meditation, and general reasoning, we introduce a

blend of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images. (Thus,

in propositions where the subject-matter is due to the senses--_e.g._

'This leaf is green'--we have such categories introduced, as being and

individuality.) But it is a very different thing to make the thoughts

pure and simple our object.

But their complaint that philosophy is unintelligible is as much due to

another reason; and that is an impatient wish to have before them as a

mental picture that which is in the mind as a thought or notion. When

people are asked to apprehend some notion, they often complain that

they do not know what they have to think. But the fact is that in a

notion there is nothing further to be thought than the notion itself.

What the phrase reveals, is a hankering after an image with which we

are already familiar. The mind, denied the use of its familiar ideas,

feels the ground where it once stood firm and at home taken away from

beneath it, and, when transported into the region of pure thought,

cannot tell where in the world it is.

One consequence of this weakness is that authors, preachers, and

orators are found most intelligible, when they speak of things which

their readers or hearers already know by rote,--things which the latter

are conversant with, and which require no explanation.

4.] The philosopher then has to reckon with popular modes of thought,

and with the objects of religion. In dealing with the ordinary modes

of mind, he will first of all, as we saw, have to prove and almost

to awaken the need for his peculiar method of knowledge. In dealing

with the objects of religion, and with truth as a whole, he will have

to show that philosophy is capable of apprehending them from its own

resources; and should a difference from religious conceptions come to

light, he will have to justify the points in which it diverges.

5.] To give the reader a preliminary explanation of the distinction

thus made, and to let him see at the same moment that the real import

of our consciousness is retained, and even for the first time put

in its proper light, when translated into the form of thought and

the notion of reason, it may be well to recall another of these old

unreasoned beliefs. And that is the conviction that to get at the truth

of any object or event, even of feelings, perceptions, opinions, and

mental ideas, we must think it over. Now in any case to think things

over is at least to transform feelings, ordinary ideas, &c. into

thoughts.

Nature has given every one a faculty of thought. But thought is all

that philosophy claims as the form proper to her business: and thus

the inadequate view which ignores the distinction stated in § 3, leads

to a new delusion, the reverse of the complaint previously mentioned

about the unintelligibility of philosophy. In other words, this science

must often submit to the slight of hearing even people who have never

taken any trouble with it talking as if they thoroughly understood all

about it. With no preparation beyond an ordinary education they do

not hesitate, especially under the influence of religious sentiment,

to philosophise and to criticise philosophy. Everybody allows that

to know any other science you must have first studied it, and that

you can only claim to express a judgment upon it in virtue of such

knowledge. Everybody allows that to make a shoe you must have learned

and practised the craft of the shoemaker, though every man has a model

in his own foot, and possesses in his hands the natural endowments for

the operations required. For philosophy alone, it seems to be imagined,

such study, care, and application are not in the least requisite.

This comfortable view of what is required for a philosopher has

recently received corroboration through the theory of immediate or

intuitive knowledge.

6.] So much for the form of philosophical knowledge. It is no less

desirable, on the other hand, that philosophy should understand that

its content is no other than _actuality,_ that core of truth which,

originally produced and producing itself within the precincts of the

mental life, has become the _world,_ the inward and outward world, of

consciousness. At first we become aware of these contents in what we

call Experience. But even Experience, as it surveys the wide range

of inward and outward existence, has sense enough to distinguish

the mere appearance, which is transient and meaningless, from what

in itself really deserves the name of actuality. As it is only in

form that philosophy is distinguished from other modes of attaining

an acquaintance with this same sum of being, it must necessarily be

in harmony with actuality and experience. In fact, this harmony may

be viewed as at least an extrinsic means of testing the truth of a

philosophy. Similarly it may be held the highest and final aim of

philosophic science to bring about, through the ascertainment of this

harmony, a reconciliation of the self-conscious reason with the reason

which _is_ in the world,--in other words, with actuality.

In the preface to my Philosophy of Law, p. xix, are found the

propositions:

What is reasonable is actual;

and, What is actual is reasonable.

These simple statements have given rise to expressions of surprise and

hostility, even in quarters where it would be reckoned an insult to

presume absence of philosophy, and still more of religion. Religion

at least need not be brought in evidence; its doctrines of the divine

government of the world affirm these propositions too decidedly. For

their philosophic sense, we must pre-suppose intelligence enough to

know, not only that God is actual, that He is the supreme actuality,

that He alone is truly actual; but also, as regards the logical

bearings of the question, that existence is in part mere appearance,

and only in part actuality. In common life, any freak of fancy, any

error, evil and everything of the nature of evil, as well as every

degenerate and transitory existence whatever, gets in a casual way

the name of actuality. But even our ordinary feelings are enough to

forbid a casual (fortuitous) existence getting the emphatic name of an

actual; for by fortuitous we mean an existence which has no greater

value than that of something possible, which may as well not be as

be. As for the term Actuality, these critics would have done well to

consider the sense in which I employ it. In a detailed Logic I had

treated amongst other things of actuality, and accurately distinguished

it not only from the fortuitous, which, after all, has existence,

but even from the cognate categories of existence and the other

modifications of being.

The actuality of the rational stands opposed by the popular fancy

that Ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras, and philosophy a mere

system of such phantasms. It is also opposed by the very different

fancy that Ideas and ideals are something far too excellent to have

actuality, or something too impotent to procure it for themselves. This

divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to the analytic

understanding which looks upon its own abstractions, dreams though they

are, as something true and real, and prides itself on the imperative

'ought,' which it takes especial pleasure in prescribing even on the

field of politics. As if the world had waited on it to learn how it

ought to be, and was not! For, if it were as it ought to be, what would

come of the precocious wisdom of that 'ought'? When understanding

turns this 'ought' against trivial external and transitory objects,

against social regulations or conditions, which very likely possess a

great relative importance for a certain time and special circles, it

may often be right. In such a case the intelligent observer may meet

much that fails to satisfy the general requirements of right; for

who is not acute enough to see a great deal in his own surroundings

which is really far from being as it ought to be? But such acuteness

is mistaken in the conceit that, when it examines these objects and

pronounces what they ought to be, it is dealing with questions of

philosophic science. The object of philosophy is the Idea: and the Idea

is not so impotent as merely to have a right or an obligation to exist

without actually existing. The object of philosophy is an actuality of

which those objects, social regulations and conditions, are only the

superficial outside.

7.] Thus reflection--thinking things over--in a general way involves

the principle (which also means the beginning) of philosophy. And when

the reflective spirit arose again in its independence in modern times,

after the epoch of the Lutheran Reformation, it did not, as in its

beginnings among the Greeks, stand merely aloof, in a world of its own,

but at once turned its energies also upon the apparently illimitable

material of the phenomenal world. In this way the name philosophy came

to be applied to all those branches of knowledge, which are engaged

in ascertaining the standard and Universal in the ocean of empirical

individualities, as well as in ascertaining the Necessary element, or

Laws, to be found in the apparent disorder of the endless masses of

the fortuitous. It thus appears that modern philosophy derives its

materials from our own personal observations and perceptions of the

external and internal world, from nature as well as from the mind and

heart of man, when both stand in the immediate presence of the observer.

This principle of Experience carries with it the unspeakably important

condition that, in order to accept and believe any fact, we must be

in contact with it; or, in more exact terms, that we must find the

fact united and combined with the certainty of our own selves. We must

be in touch with our subject-matter, whether it be by means of our

external senses, or, else, by our profounder mind and our intimate

self-consciousness.--This principle is the same as that which has in

the present day been termed faith, immediate knowledge, the revelation

in the outward world, and, above all, in our own heart.

Those sciences, which thus got the name of philosophy, we call

_empirical_ sciences, for the reason that they take their departure

from experience. Still the essential results which they aim at and

provide, are laws, general propositions, a theory--the thoughts of what

is found existing. On this ground the Newtonian physics was called

Natural Philosophy. Hugo Grotius, again, by putting together and

comparing the behaviour of states towards each other as recorded in

history, succeeded, with the help of the ordinary methods of general

reasoning, in laying down certain general principles, and establishing

a theory which may be termed the Philosophy of International Law. In

England this is still the usual signification of the term philosophy.

Newton continues to be celebrated as the greatest of philosophers: and

the name goes down as far as the price-lists of instrument-makers.

All instruments, such as the thermometer and barometer, which do not

come under the special head of magnetic or electric apparatus, are

styled philosophical instruments[1]. Surely thought, and not a mere

combination of wood, iron, &c. ought to be called the instrument of

philosophy! The recent science of Political Economy in particular,

which in Germany is known as Rational Economy of the State, or

intelligent national economy, has in England especially appropriated

the name of philosophy.[2]

8.] In its own field this empirical knowledge may at first give

satisfaction; but in two ways it is seen to come short. In the first

place there is another circle of objects which it does not embrace.

These are Freedom, Spirit, and God. They belong to a different

sphere, not because it can be said that they have nothing to do with

experience; for though they are certainly not experiences of the

senses, it is quite an identical proposition to say that whatever is

in consciousness is experienced. The real ground for assigning them to

another field of cognition is that in their scope and _content_ these

objects evidently show themselves as infinite.

There is an old phrase often wrongly attributed to Aristotle, and

supposed to express the general tenor of his philosophy. '_Nihil

est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu_': there is nothing in

thought which has not been in sense and experience. If speculative

philosophy refused to admit this maxim, it can only have done so from

a misunderstanding. It will, however, on the converse side no less

assert: '_Nihil est in sensu quod non fuerit in intellectu._' And this

may be taken in two senses. In the general sense it means that νοῦς or

spirit (the more profound idea of νοῦς in modern thought) is the cause

of the world. In its special meaning (see § 2) it asserts that the

sentiment of right, morals, and religion is a sentiment (and in that

way an experience) of such scope and such character that it can spring

from and rest upon thought alone.

9.] But in the second place in point of _form_ the subjective reason

desires a further satisfaction than empirical knowledge gives; and

this form, is, in the widest sense of the term, Necessity (§ 1). The

method of empirical science exhibits two defects. The first is that the

Universal or general principle contained in it, the genus, or kind, &c,

is, on its own account, indeterminate and vague, and therefore not on

its own account connected with the Particulars or the details. Either

is external and accidental to the other; and it is the same with the

particular facts which are brought into union: each is external and

accidental to the others. The second defect is that the beginnings are

in every case data and postulates, neither accounted for nor deduced.

In both these points the form of necessity fails to get its due. Hence

reflection, whenever it sets itself to remedy these defects, becomes

speculative thinking, the thinking proper to philosophy. As a species

of reflection, therefore, which, though it has a certain community

of nature with the reflection already mentioned, is nevertheless

different from it, philosophic thought thus possesses, in addition to

the common forms, some forms of its own, of which the Notion may be

taken as the type.

The relation of speculative science to the other sciences may be

stated in the following terms. It does not in the least neglect the

empirical facts contained in the several sciences, but recognises and

adopts them: it appreciates and applies towards its own structure the

universal element in these sciences, their laws and classifications:

but besides all this, into the categories of science it introduces, and

gives currency to, other categories. The difference, looked at in this

way, is only a change of categories. Speculative Logic contains all

previous Logic and Metaphysics: it preserves the same forms of thought,

the same laws and objects,--while at the same time remodelling and

expanding them with wider categories.

From _notion_ in the speculative sense we should distinguish what

is ordinarily called a notion. The phrase, that no notion can ever

comprehend the Infinite, a phrase which has been repeated over and over

again till it has grown axiomatic, is based upon this narrow estimate

of what is meant by notions.

10.] This thought, which is proposed as the instrument of philosophic

knowledge, itself calls for further explanation. We must understand in

what way it possesses necessity or cogency: and when it claims to be

equal to the task of apprehending the absolute objects (God, Spirit,

Freedom), that claim must be substantiated. Such an explanation,

however, is itself a lesson in philosophy, and properly falls within

the scope of the science itself. A preliminary attempt to make matters

plain would only be unphilosophical, and consist of a tissue of

assumptions, assertions, and inferential pros and cons, _e.g._ of

dogmatism without cogency, as against which there would be an equal

right of counter-dogmatism.

A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy bids us pause before

proceeding to inquire into God or into the true being of things, and

tells us first of all to examine the faculty of cognition and see

whether it is equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to become

acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which

it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our

trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has

won for it general assent and admiration; the result of which has been

to withdraw cognition from an interest in its objects and absorption in

the study of them, and to direct it back upon itself; and so turn it to

a question of form. Unless we wish to be deceived bywords, it is easy

to see what this amounts to. In the case of other instruments, we can

try and criticise them in other ways than by setting about the special

work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge can

only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called

instrument is the same thing as to know it. But to seek to know before

we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to

venture into the water until he had learned to swim.

Reinhold saw the confusion with which this style of commencement is

chargeable, and tried to get out of the difficulty by starting with a

hypothetical and problematical stage of philosophising. In this way he

supposed that it would be possible, nobody can tell how, to get along,

until we found ourselves, further on, arrived at the primary truth

of truths. His method, when closely looked into, will be seen to be

identical with a very common practice. It starts from a substratum

of experiential fact, or from a provisional assumption which has

been brought into a definition; and then proceeds to analyse this

starting-point. We can detect in Reinhold's argument a perception of

the truth, that the usual course which proceeds by assumptions and

anticipations is no better than a hypothetical and problematical mode

of procedure. But his perceiving this does not alter the character of

this method; it only makes clear its imperfections.

11.] The special conditions which call for the existence of philosophy

maybe thus described. The mind or spirit, when it is sentient or

perceptive, finds its object in something sensuous; when it imagines,

in a picture or image; when it wills, in an aim or end. But in contrast

to, or it may be only in distinction from, these forms of its existence

and of its objects, the mind has also to gratify the cravings of

its highest and most inward life. That innermost self is thought.

Thus the mind renders thought its object. In the best meaning of the

phrase, it comes to itself; for thought is its principle, and its

very unadulterated self. But while thus occupied, thought entangles

itself in contradictions, _e.g._ loses itself in the hard-and-fast

non-identity of its thoughts, and so, instead of reaching itself,

is caught and held in its counterpart. This result, to which honest

but narrow thinking leads the mere understanding, is resisted by the

loftier craving of which we have spoken. That craving expresses the

perseverance of thought, which continues true to itself, even in this

conscious loss of its native rest and independence, 'that it may

overcome' and work out in itself the solution of its own contradictions.

To see that thought in its very nature is dialectical, and that, as

understanding, it must fall into contradiction,--the negative of

itself, will form one of the main lessons of logic. When thought

grows hopeless of ever achieving, by its own means, the solution of

the contradiction which it has by its own action brought upon itself,

it turns back to those solutions of the question with which the mind

had learned to pacify itself in some of its other modes and forms.

Unfortunately, however, the retreat of thought has led it, as Plato

noticed even in his time, to a very uncalled-for hatred of reason

(misology); and it then takes up against its own endeavours that

hostile attitude of which an example is seen in the doctrine that

'immediate' knowledge, as it is called, is the exclusive form in which

we become cognisant of truth.

12.] The rise of philosophy is due to these cravings of thought. Its

point of departure is Experience; including under that name both our

immediate consciousness and the inductions from it. Awakened, as it

were, by this stimulus, thought is vitally characterised by raising

itself above the natural state of mind, above the senses and inferences

from the senses into its own unadulterated element, and by assuming,

accordingly, at first a stand-aloof and negative attitude towards

the point from which it started. Through this state of antagonism to

the phenomena of sense its first satisfaction is found in itself, in

the Idea of the universal essence of these phenomena: an Idea (the

Absolute, or God) which may be more or less abstract. Meanwhile, on

the other hand, the sciences, based on experience, exert upon the

mind a stimulus to overcome the form in which their varied contents

are presented, and to elevate these contents to the rank of necessary

truth. For the facts of science have the aspect of a vast conglomerate,

one thing coming side by side with another, as if they were merely

given and presented,--as in short devoid of all essential or necessary

connexion. In consequence of this stimulus thought is dragged out

of its unrealised universality and its fancied or merely possible

satisfaction, and impelled onwards to a development from itself. On

one hand this development only means that thought incorporates the

contents of science, in all their speciality of detail as submitted. On

the other it makes these contents imitate the action of the original

creative thought, and present the aspect of a free evolution determined

by the logic of the fact alone.

On the relation between 'immediacy' and 'mediation' in consciousness

we shall speak later, expressly and with more detail. Here it may be

sufficient to premise that, though the two 'moments' or factors present

themselves as distinct, still neither of them can be absent, nor can

one exist apart from the other. Thus the knowledge of God, as of every

supersensible reality, is in its true character an exaltation above

sensations or perceptions: it consequently involves a negative attitude

to the initial data of sense, and to that extent implies mediation.

For to mediate is to take something as a beginning and to go onward to

a second thing; so that the existence of this second thing depends on

our having reached it from something else contradistinguished from it.

In spite of this, the knowledge of God is no mere sequel, dependent

on the empirical phase of consciousness: in fact, its independence is

essentially secured through this negation and exaltation.--No doubt, if

we attach an unfair prominence to the fact of mediation, and represent

it as implying a state of conditionedness, it may be said--not that the

remark would mean much--that philosophy is the child of experience, and

owes its rise to _a posteriori_ fact. (As a matter of fact, thinking

is always the negation of what we have immediately before us.) With

as much truth however we may be said to owe eating to the means of

nourishment, so long as we can have no eating without them. If we take

this view, eating is certainly represented as ungrateful: it devours

that to which it owes itself. Thinking, upon this view of its action,

is equally ungrateful.

But there is also an _a priori_ aspect of thought, where by a

mediation, not made by anything external but by a reflection into self,

we have that immediacy which is universality, the self-complacency

of thought which is so much at home with itself that it feels an

innate indifference to descend to particulars, and in that way to the

development of its own nature. It is thus also with religion, which,

whether it be rude or elaborate, whether it be invested with scientific

precision of detail or confined to the simple faith of the heart,

possesses, throughout, the same intensive nature of contentment and

felicity. But if thought never gets further than the universality of

the Ideas, as was perforce the case in the first philosophies (when

the Eleatics never got beyond Being, or Heraclitus beyond Becoming),

it is justly open to the charge of formalism. Even in a more advanced

phase of philosophy, we may often find a doctrine which has mastered

merely certain abstract propositions or formulae, such as, 'In the

absolute all is one,' 'Subject and object are identical,'--and only

repeating the same thing when it comes to particulars. Bearing in

mind this first period of thought, the period of mere generality, we

may safely say that experience is the real author of _growth_ and

_advance_ in philosophy. For, firstly, the empirical sciences do not

stop short at the mere observation of the individual features of a

phenomenon. By the aid of thought, they are able to meet philosophy

with materials prepared for it, in the shape of general uniformities,

_i.e._ laws, and classifications of the phenomena. When this is done,

the particular facts which they contain are ready to be received into

philosophy. This, secondly, implies a certain compulsion on thought

itself to proceed to these concrete specific truths. The reception into

philosophy of these scientific materials, now that thought has removed

their immediacy and made them cease to be mere data, forms at the same

time a development of thought out of itself. Philosophy, then, owes

its development to the empirical sciences. In return it gives their

contents what is so vital to them, the freedom of thought,--gives them,

in short, an _a priori_ character. These contents are now warranted

necessary, and no longer depend on the evidence of facts merely, that

they were so found and so experienced. The fact as experienced thus

becomes an illustration and a copy of the original and completely

self-supporting activity of thought.

13.] Stated in exact terms, such is the origin and development of

philosophy. But the History of Philosophy gives us the same process

from an historical and external point of view. The stages in the

evolution of the Idea there seem to follow each other by accident, and

to present merely a number of different and unconnected principles,

which the several systems of philosophy carry out in their own way.

But it is not so. For these thousands of years the same Architect has

directed the work: and that Architect is the one living Mind whose

nature is to think, to bring to self-consciousness what it is, and,

with its being thus set as object before it, to be at the same time

raised above it, and so to reach a higher stage of its own being.

The different systems which the history of philosophy presents are

therefore not irreconcilable with unity. We may either say, that it

is one philosophy at different degrees of maturity: or that the

particular principle, which is the groundwork of each system, is

but a branch of one and the same universe of thought. In philosophy

the latest birth of time is the result of all the systems that have

preceded it, and must include their principles; and so, if, on other

grounds, it deserve the title of philosophy, will be the fullest, most

comprehensive, and most adequate system of all.

The spectacle of so many and so various systems of philosophy suggests

the necessity of defining more exactly the relation of Universal to

Particular. When the universal is made a mere form and co-ordinated

with the particular, as if it were on the same level, it sinks into a

particular itself. Even common sense in every-day matters is above the

absurdity of setting a universal _beside_ the particulars. Would any

one, who wished for fruit, reject cherries, pears, and grapes, on the

ground that they were cherries, pears, or grapes, and not fruit? But

when philosophy is in question, the excuse of many is that philosophies

are so different, and none of them is _the_ philosophy,--that each is

only _a_ philosophy. Such a plea is assumed to justify any amount of

contempt for philosophy. And yet cherries too are fruit. Often, too, a

system, of which the principle is the universal, is put on a level with

another of which the principle is a particular, and with theories which

deny the existence of philosophy altogether. Such systems are said to

be only different views of philosophy. With equal justice, light and

darkness might be styled different kinds of light.

14.] The same evolution of thought which is exhibited in the history

of philosophy is presented in the System of Philosophy itself. Here,

instead of surveying the process, as we do in history, from the

outside, we see the movement of thought clearly defined in its native

medium. The thought, which is genuine and self-supporting, must be

intrinsically concrete; it must be an Idea; and when it is viewed in

the whole of its universality, it is the Idea, or the Absolute. The

science of this Idea must form a system. For the truth is concrete;

that is, whilst it gives a bond and principle of unity, it also

possesses an internal source of development. Truth, then, is only

possible as a universe or totality of thought; and the freedom of the

whole, as well as the necessity of the several sub-divisions, which it

implies, are only possible when these are discriminated and defined.

Unless it is a system, a philosophy is not a scientific production.

Unsystematic philosophising can only be expected to give expression to

personal peculiarities of mind, and has no principle for the regulation

of its contents. Apart from their interdependence and organic union,

the truths of philosophy are valueless, and must then be treated as

baseless hypotheses, or personal convictions. Yet many philosophical

treatises confine themselves to such an exposition of the opinions and

sentiments of the author.

The term _system_ is often misunderstood. It does not denote a

philosophy, the principle of which is narrow and to be distinguished

from others. On the contrary, a genuine philosophy makes it a principle

to include every particular principle.

15.] Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle

rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the

philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium.

The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the

limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle.

The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The

Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole

Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is

a necessary member of the organisation.

16.] In the form of an Encyclopaedia, the science has no room for a

detailed exposition of particulars, and must be limited to setting

forth the commencement of the special sciences and the notions of

cardinal importance in them.

How much of the particular parts is requisite to constitute a

particular branch of knowledge is so far indeterminate, that the part,

if it is to be something true, must be not an isolated member merely,

but itself an organic whole. The entire field of philosophy therefore

really forms a single science; but it may also be viewed as a total,

composed of several particular sciences.

The encyclopaedia of philosophy must not be confounded with ordinary

encyclopaedias. An ordinary encyclopaedia does not pretend to be more

than an aggregation of sciences, regulated by no principle, and merely

as experience offers them. Sometimes it even includes what merely bear

the name of sciences, while they are nothing more than a collection of

bits of information. In an aggregate like this, the several branches of

knowledge owe their place in the encyclopaedia to extrinsic reasons,

and their unity is therefore artificial: they are _arranged,_ but we

cannot say they form a _system._ For the same reason, especially as the

materials to be combined also depend upon no one rule or principle,

the arrangement is at best an experiment, and will always exhibit

inequalities.

An encyclopaedia of philosophy excludes three kinds of partial science.

I. It excludes mere aggregates of bits of information. Philology in

its _prima facie_ aspect belongs to this class. II. It rejects the

quasi-sciences, which are founded on an act of arbitrary will alone,

such as Heraldry. Sciences of this class are positive from beginning to

end. III. In another class of sciences, also styled positive, but which

have a rational basis and a rational beginning, philosophy claims that

constituent as its own. The positive features remain the property of

the sciences themselves.

The positive element in the last class of sciences is of different

sorts. (I) Their commencement, though rational at bottom, yields to the

influence of fortuitousness, when they have to bring their universal

truth into contact with actual facts and the single phenomena of

experience. In this region of chance and change, the adequate notion

of science must yield its place to reasons or grounds of explanation.

Thus, _e.g._ in the science of jurisprudence, or in the system of

direct and indirect taxation, it is necessary to have certain points

precisely and definitively settled which lie beyond the competence of

the absolute lines laid down by the pure notion. A certain latitude

of settlement accordingly is left: and each point may be determined

in one way on one principle, in another way on another, and admits of

no definitive certainty. Similarly the Idea of Nature, when parcelled

out in detail, is dissipated into contingencies. Natural history,

geography, and medicine stumble upon descriptions of existence, upon

kinds and distinctions, which are not determined by reason, but by

sport and adventitious incidents. Even history comes under the same

category. The Idea is its essence and inner nature; but, as it appears,

everything is under contingency and in the field of voluntary action.

(II) These sciences are positive also in failing to recognise the

finite nature of what they predicate, and to point out how these

categories and their whole sphere pass into a higher. They assume their

statements to possess an authority beyond appeal. Here the fault lies

in the finitude of the form, as in the previous instance it lay in

the matter. (III) In close sequel to this, sciences are positive in

consequence of the inadequate grounds on which their conclusions rest:

based as these are on detached and casual inference, upon feeling,

faith, and authority, and, generally speaking, upon the deliverances

of inward and outward perception. Under this head we must also class

the philosophy which proposes to build upon anthropology,' facts of

consciousness, inward sense, or outward experience. It may happen,

however, that empirical is an epithet applicable only to the form of

scientific exposition; whilst intuitive sagacity has arranged what are

mere phenomena, according to the essential sequence of the notion. In

such a case the contrasts between the varied and numerous phenomena

brought together serve to eliminate the external and accidental

circumstances of their conditions, and the universal thus comes clearly

into view. Guided by such an intuition, experimental physics will

present the rational science of Nature,--as history will present the

science of human affairs and actions--in an external picture, which

mirrors the philosophic notion.

17.] It may seem as if philosophy, in order to start on its course,

had, like the rest of the sciences, to begin with a subjective

presupposition. The sciences postulate their respective objects, such

as space, number, or whatever it be; and it might be supposed that

philosophy had also to postulate the existence of thought. But the

two cases are not exactly parallel. It is by the free act of thought

that it occupies a point of view, in which it is for its own self, and

thus gives itself an object of its own production. Nor is this all.

The very point of view, which originally is taken on its own evidence

only, must in the course of the science be converted to a result,--the

ultimate result in which philosophy returns into itself and reaches

the point with which it began. In this manner philosophy exhibits the

appearance of a circle which closes with itself, and has no beginning

in the same way as the other sciences have. To speak of a beginning of

philosophy has a meaning only in relation to a person who proposes to

commence the study, and not in relation to the science as science. The

same thing may be thus expressed. The notion of science--the notion

therefore with which we start--which, for the very reason that it is

initial, implies a separation between the thought which is our object,

and the subject philosophising which is, as it were, external to the

former, must be grasped and comprehended by the science itself. This

is in short the one single aim, action, and goal of philosophy--to

arrive at the notion of its notion, and thus secure its return and its

satisfaction.

18.] As the whole science, and only the whole, can exhibit what the

Idea or system of reason is, it is impossible to give in a preliminary

way a general impression of a philosophy. Nor can a division of

philosophy into its parts be intelligible, except in connexion with the

system. A preliminary division, like the limited conception from which

it comes, can only be an anticipation. Here however it is premised that

the Idea turns out to be the thought which is completely identical

with itself, and not identical simply in the abstract, but also in its

action of setting itself over against itself, so as to gain a being of

its own, and yet of being in full possession of itself while it is in

this other. Thus philosophy is subdivided into three parts:

I. Logic, the science of the Idea in and for itself.

II. The Philosophy of Nature: the science of the Idea in its otherness.

III. The Philosophy of Mind: the science of the Idea come back to

itself out of that otherness.

As observed in § 15, the differences between the several philosophical

sciences are only aspects or specialisations of the one Idea or system

of reason, which and which alone is alike exhibited in these different

media. In Nature nothing else would have to be discerned, except the

Idea: but the Idea has here divested itself of its proper being. In

Mind, again, the Idea has asserted a being of its own, and is on the

way to become absolute. Every such form in which the Idea is expressed,

is at the same time a passing or fleeting stage: and hence each of

these subdivisions has not only to know its contents as an object which

has being for the time, but also in the same act to expound how these

contents pass into their higher circle. To represent the relation

between them as a division, therefore, leads to misconception; for it

co-ordinates the several parts or sciences one beside another, as if

they had no innate development, but were, like so many species, really

and radically distinct.

[1] The journal, too, edited by Thomson is called 'Annals of

Philosophy; or, Magazine of Chemistry, Mineralogy, Mechanics, Natural

History, Agriculture, and Arts.' We can easily guess from the title

what sort of subjects are here to be understood under the term

'philosophy.' Among the advertisements of books just published, I

lately found the following notice in an English newspaper: 'The Art of

Preserving the Hair, on Philosophical Principles, neatly printed in

post 8vo, price seven shillings.' By philosophical principles for the

preservation of the hair are probably meant chemical or physiological

principles.

[2] In connexion with the general principles of Political Economy,

the term 'philosophical' is frequently heard from the lips of English

statesmen, even in their public speeches. In the House of Commons, on

the 2nd Feb. 1825, Brougham, speaking oh the address in reply to the

speech from the throne, talked of 'the statesman-like and philosophical

principles of Free-trade,--for philosophical they undoubtedly are--upon

the acceptance of which his majesty this day congratulated the House.'

Nor is this language confined to members of the Opposition. At the

shipowners' yearly dinner in the same month, under the chairmanship

of the Premier Lord Liverpool, supported by Canning the Secretary of

State, and Sir C. Long the Paymaster-General of the Army, Canning

in reply to the toast which had been proposed said: 'A period has

just begun, in which ministers have it in their power to apply to

the administration of this country the sound maxims of a profound

philosophy.' Differences there may be between English and German

philosophy: still, considering that elsewhere the name of philosophy

is used only as a nickname and insult, or as something odious, it is

a matter of rejoicing to see it still honoured in the mouth of the

English Government.